The UN Commissars of Climate Change

It is one of the stock hypocrisies of United Nations climate careerists, that while deploring carbon-emitting travel by everyone else, they have turned the UN into a prodigious generator of long, lavish and frequent "climate-change" conferences, held in enticing or exotic locales worldwide -- in places such as Bali, Rio, Cancun and Paris.

From around the globe, participants board airliners (many of their tickets subsidized by your tax dollars) and carbon-emit their way to the next jamboree. From these grand climate shindigs, UN officials emerge to promise that if we'll just trust them to allocate a couple of things of ever-expanding scope -- for instance, the wealth of the developed world and the energy flows of the planet -- they will aim over the next century or so to fine-tune the temperature of the earth to within a few decimal points of where it was on Al Gore's 60th birthday...or something like that.

It's the kind of performance that needs a skeptical eye, and full access by an independent press. It should be cause for great alarm when the conference authorities start walling out any reporters they suspect might dissent from UN climate doctrine.

Which is exactly what's going on. Next month, from Nov. 7-18, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is planning a huge conference in Marrakesh, Morocco. The UNFCCC has approved press passes for some 3,000 journalists who wish to cover this event.

But it seems that dissenters from UN dogma need not apply. The UNFCCC has refused accreditation to a Canadian media outlet, The Rebel Media, home to The Ezra Levant Show (full disclosure: I have been an occasional guest on this show, discussing topics including the UN).

Why did the UNFCCC refuse to accredit Rebel Media? Apparently because Rebel Media just couldn't be relied upon to echo whatever propaganda the UN might put out. In an interview with Canada's CBC Radio, UNFCCC spokesperson Nick Nuttall suggested that The Rebel's cardinal sin was Levant's dissent from UN climate doctrine. Referring to Levant, Nuttall said: "I don't see what he's actually reporting, you know, as being particularly helpful."

That's a fascinating standard for media accreditation: to deny access if the reporter is deemed by the authorities to be other than "particularly helpful."

It becomes all the more fascinating in light of Nuttall's additional comments to CBC Radio that he sees Rebel Media as advocating certain views, and "advocacy media outlets do not qualify for accreditation." That's baloney, as Nuttall himself must surely be aware. Here's the Toronto Star, which does not always agree with Ezra Levant's views, but ran an editorial on Friday arguing that "The UN should not bar The Rebel from climate conference."

A glance at the UNFCCC's own web site suggests that the objection to Rebel Media has nothing to do with advocacy per se. It has everything to do with what the UN itself does or does not wish to see advocated. Nuttall's own shop -- he is UNFCCC coordinator of "communications and outreach" -- is in the business of wholesale advocacy, especially when it comes to soliciting money -- lots of money -- for projects spawned under the UNFCCC.

This brand of advocacy includes, for instance, a UNFCCC web page showing a "Climate Funding Snapshot" (touted by Nuttall on Twitter, with a request to "help us grow it!") which apparently aims to encourage contributions by showing how much has already been pledged or received from various quarters. The figures range from millions to trillions, give or take sundry billions -- a red flag, one might suspect, for some of the world's biggest slush funds, with all the accompanying potential, in UN hands, for graft, fraud and abuse (especially if the UN's climate commissars dole out press passes solely to their select acolytes in the media).

How was this financial "snapshot" compiled? The accompanying text implies it was a public relations process akin to producing compost:

In extracting and presenting this information, the UNFCCC secretariat has applied no methodology, analysis or other subjective criteria. The graphic is not comprehensive, but rather a snapshot of diverse funding sources and funds contributing to climate action, in some cases expressed in local currency.

It is, perhaps, refreshing to see the UNFCCC actually disclose in any context that it hasn't really bothered with analysis. It is horrifying, and disgusting, however, to hear a spokesman for this money-guzzling UN gang trying to justify the decision to refuse access at their Morocco conference to Rebel Media, whose reporters might just do some analysis of their own.